Operations and Patient Safety for Healthcare IT Staff

Operational Needs in Health IT

There are many different operational needs in Health IT. In your future job, you may be helping to troubleshoot a network outage that takes place during implementation of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) at a hospital. Perhaps there’s a dashboard in the command center that is not working. There could be patient safety issues arising from a recent flood in the basement of an ambulatory surgical center. Regardless of where you work in Health IT support, concepts like self-service tickets, priority levels, tiered support and various help desk resources will play a role. In this module, you’ll watch a demo of the steps taken by the provider when initially submitting a self-service ticket. We’ll also cover situations where a self-service ticket shouldn’t be submitted because of the criticality or severity of the issue. Be rest assured that in addition to relying on your training and strong problem-solving skills, there will be other resources at your disposal when you begin working in Health IT Support. Examples include a standard list of questions to ask when on a help desk call, troubleshooting documents, tip sheets and knowledge base articles. Help desks can’t script every single scenario that’s encountered. But especially when you first start in a new role, having a list of standard questions that might be appropriate regardless of the call type is useful. It won’t take you long to remember that at the start of each interaction you need to confirm the caller’s full name, their user ID, and a reliable call back number. You’ll also become savvy in eliciting information about when the problem started and whether it can be reproduced. Over time, you'll get better at distinguishing between software versus hardware issues and having a clear escalation path if It’sit’s not something you can resolve. It will take time however to gain comfort in knowing when an issue is more of an enterprise-wide problem with other sites being involved rather than just something impacting a single user. There will also be times when all your resources don’t help you with the right answer. This is where teamwork, communication, and documentation are key in helping to get a Health IT issue resolved. At the end of this module, you’ll learn about the role patient wristbands and barcode scanning in healthcare. We’ll cover some of the ways in which issues can arise that may lead to an employee contacting the help desk. We’ll wrap up with a lesson on the many uses of printers in healthcare, such as printing of specimen labels before a lab draw, medical records for a nursing home, prescriptions for a patient, disability forms for a physical therapist, or discharge instructions before a patient leaves the hospital. When you receive a call from a clinician or healthcare staff member regarding a problem with printing it can be tough to pinpoint what the exact issue is. We’ll go through a systematic approach that can you help you in isolating whether it’s an issue with the printer itself, the computer, network, or the application.

JIRA and Documentation

In this module you’ll be introduced to the JIRA process that can be used for tracking and managing changes in Health IT. We’ll share with you what the different parts that make up a JiraJIRA ticket are and some of examples of how a ticket can move towards being resolved. You’ll gain appreciation for why clear documentation is essential when working to resolve issues. Despite the best laid plans, there are of course times when health information systems are not up and running. That’s why you need to be aware of scheduled and unscheduled downtimes as well as the downtime procedures that need to be implemented when these situations occur. You’ll also get to hear about one of the toughest tickets Liz has dealt with during an unscheduled downtime.

Health IT and Patient Safety

In the final module of this course, we focus on patient safety. We’ll go into detail about what it means to be part of a high reliability organization in healthcare. You’ll hear about the role of Health IT in promoting patient safety. We’ll cover the importance of checklists and define concepts like medication errors, near misses, and sentinel events.